Don't look away from climate change

16 September 2019

In my life and my work, I deal with deadlines. I need to write to deadline and I set deadlines for other writers. I joke (but it’s very true) that I couldn’t get anything done without a deadline. I love deadlines.

But when I read the expected deadlines for climate change to become catastrophic, these points of no return meant to frighten us into action, all I can feel is dread.

In the past few years, we’ve become more familiar with the concept of eco-anxiety (also known as climate anxiety or solastalgia). This is a sometimes debilitating anxiety people get when engaging with climate change, sometimes triggered by news articles about climate change. I’m pretty sure I have a low-level amount of it. I think in some ways it would be hard not to. I’m already an anxious person, and I have to engage with the most up-to-date information about climate change for my job.

Every time I need to read an article that deals with climate change, I can feel a tightness in my body. It’s a physical response, the churning in my stomach and my shoulders hunching over, as though I’m trying to protect myself from the information. I read it anyway, focusing on the quality of the writing and the strength of the argument. Sitting in my office chair, I feel a little like the dog meme who says to himself, ‘this is fine’.

The overwhelming temptation is to not think about it too hard. I’m an avoider and procrastinator by nature, so this falls straight into my bad habits. But climate change is also, for all my privilege, becoming difficult to avoid, at least without employing some serious cognitive dissonance. It creeps in when I walk through my suburb and notice that each year the wild freesias are coming a bit earlier. I think about it when I am at an airport, and instead of wondering about where all the people are going, I think about all the jet fuel that those planes will be using.

There are, of course, many people who don’t have the privilege of thinking about climate change selectively. The real people who are, or soon will be, directly and adversely affected by climate change and the ways we pollute our planet: the people who don’t have enough food and water, the people who live in smoggy cities, the people who live in cities or countries threatened by

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Don't look away from climate change

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